**1. Introduction**

According to the World Population Change Report published by the World Bank, the global population has increased by approximately 1 billion every 12 years since 1975. At the same time, the world has experienced rapid urbanization and a large influx of people into cities, with more than half of the population now living in urban areas, and this proportion is predicted to rise to two-thirds by 2050 [1]. Transformation of the social economy increases the pressure on land use, and various types and forms of land use conflicts are widespread across the world [2–6]. As the most populous country in the world, China has experienced unprecedented rapid urbanization and industrialization,

**Citation:** Dong, G.; Ge, Y.; Jia, H.; Sun, C.; Pan, S. Land Use Multi-Suitability, Land Resource Scarcity and Diversity of Human Needs: A New Framework for Land Use Conflict Identification. *Land* **2021**, *10*, 1003. https://doi.org/10.3390/ land10101003

Academic Editors: Dong Jiang, Jinwei Dong and Gang Lin

Received: 28 August 2021 Accepted: 16 September 2021 Published: 23 September 2021

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with the urbanization level rising from 17.9% before the reform and opening-up to 63.89% in 2020. This extensive development model has made China face increasingly severe land use conflicts, which are mainly manifested in the disorderly expansion of urban and rural settlements occupying high-quality farmland and ecological spaces, leading to the fragmentation of cultivated land and a decline in the quality of the ecological environment, further threatening food security, ecological security and the sustainable development of urban and rural areas [7–10].

Land use conflict identification is the premise of land use conflict prevention, mediation and settlement and is the core focus of land-use conflict research. Land use conflict identification methods mainly includes participatory assessment [11,12], game theory [13], landscape ecological risk assessment [14,15] and multi-objective comprehensive assessment [8,16,17]. Participatory evaluation has strong subjectivity and is suitable for smallscale research. Game theory focuses on strategic analysis, which is difficult to achieve quantitative evaluation of land use conflicts [16]. The landscape ecological risk assessment method only uses land use data and pays attention to landscape pattern characteristics of land use, but does not take social and economic factors into account [15,16]. The multiobjective comprehensive evaluation method has obvious advantages compared with other methods [16,18]. It can quantitatively evaluate land use conflicts at multiple scales, such as administrative divisions and grids, and can take socioeconomic and natural attributes into account.

Iojă, Ni¸tă, Vânău, Onose and Gavrilidis [19] selected 10 indicators from two variables: space and urban development, to evaluate the spatial distribution of land use conflicts at administrative units in Bucharest Metropolitan Area. Jiang, Meng and Zhu [16] applied the multi-objective evaluation method and constructed a competitive evaluation index system for cultivated, construction and ecological land using two dimensions: land suitability and driving force of land use conversion and analyzed the temporal and spatial characteristics of land use conflicts in the middle reaches of the Heihe River. Zou, Liu, Wang, Yang and Wang [8] evaluated the suitability of construction, agricultural and ecological land by selecting evaluation indices from four factors: nature, location, society and policy and further identified the types and intensities of land use conflicts. Jing et al. [20] constructed a suitability evaluation index system for production, living and ecological land and identified potential land use conflicts. Kim and Arnhold [21] measured land use conflicts in agricultural basins using two dimensions: land use preference and location importance.

These studies have provided many reference methods and a large number of important conclusions for the identification of land use conflicts and form an important starting point for this study. Although there is still a lack of unified standards and rules for the construction of the evaluation index system of land use conflicts, consensus has been reached on the causes of land use conflicts, and it is believed that land use multi-suitability, land resource scarcity and diversity of human needs are the fundamental causes of land use conflicts [16,22–25]. They are also a necessary condition for land use conflicts. All three are indispensable. Unfortunately, there are a few quantitative assessments of land resource scarcity and diversity of human needs, although some socio-economic and policy indicators, such as population density [16,20], impact of central cities [20,23] and land use planning [8,16,23], have been introduced. This will reduce the accuracy of land use conflict identification and the feasibility of land use conflict mediation.

In view of this, this study attempts to build a new framework for land use conflict identification based on land use multi-suitability, land resource scarcity and diversity of human needs and uses Jinan city as an example to conduct empirical research. This study expands the identification method of land use conflict, which is helpful to land use conflict mediation, promote rational use of land resources and optimize land spatial pattern.
